Hi @mark_vanorder !
I've got good news for you, you can get rid of that second set of course navigation on the embedded page with a nifty parameter ?embedded=true. It'll still look a little funny on your page, but should work well for students. H2's come out a little differently because it's embedded.
Good luck,
Cheers - Shar
Thanks for the ping ishar-uwβ, and hi @mark_vanorder β! I would second what Sharmaine said about considering the blog option. I'm not sure why there is any reason to prefer a 100% Canvas solution when it seems like a blog would give you the kind of formatting control you want to have, while probably also having lots of other advantages also (doing content management is so much easier in a blog, content is much easier to reuse than in Canvas, etc.).
I would also second the use of a blog just to emphasize to students what it means to craft something that you know is available for public consumption beyond the class since it sounds like you are encouraging your students to do the same with their portfolios and other coursework: there is work they do inside the class, but also work they are sharing, purposefully, with an audience beyond that class. If they see you using a platform like WordPress which can appear in Canvas AND can be accessed outside Canvas, that is a way to get them used to that same idea also.
That's a big reason why I prefer blogs as much content vehicle: I blog, and my students blog also. That means every time I do the announcements using a blogging tool (or any other content that I publish with a blog platform), I am modeling that practice for them. By using Canvas, I am not modeling anything that is of use to my students, but when I use real tools (for me that means blogs, Twitter, Diigo, GoogleDocs, plus a class wiki), then I am helping them learn about those tools.
Especially in a class for Marketing majors, I would guess that they would benefit enormously from seeing good use of social media: blogs, Twitter, etc. etc. ... far more than they benefit from seeing a Canvas hack. π
I keep my classes open so you can see how I embed an announcements blog as my course homepage. The blog has the additional advantage for me of sharing content across classes; I use the same announcements blog for my India class and for my Myth class; blog once β display twice (well, three times; two instances of one class, and one instance of the other):
I'm a big fan of dynamic content, esp. randomizers, and it's just easier to manage javascripts inside a blog than hacking around in Canvas. So, for example, in the blog sidebar that's a random growth mindset cat; you'll almost certainly see a different cat when you click on one of those course links and the page loads. My goal is for students to see new announcements every day AND to see new cats every time they pass through the homepage even multiple times per day. Let there be newness! π
That's a lot easier than the recommendation I started to give to rebuild the content based on the API but deleted because I had other things to work on, ishar-uw. I was throwing it into one of those "you learn something new everyday, most of which you hope you never have to use" categories.
Then I looked into it further. I would not recommend @mark_vanorder using it. The embedded page will look reasonable, but if a student clicks on a link within the iframe, then it opens up Canvas, without the embedded=true query parameter, and now you have the Canvas navigation within an iframe.
Here's the code I put on my page. I copied the URL for the announcements page, the protocol and hostname are not required as the relative URL will work, but can include them as well. I will admit that I try really hard not to use iframes, although they are useful for sandboxing pages, like on SpeedGrader. That means that there may be a better way than setting the width to 100% and the height to some random but large-enough value. I do not know how that will play inside Mobile.
<p><iframe src="/courses/896851/announcements?embedded=true" width="100%" height="640"></iframe></p>
Here is my embedded page
Now here is what it looks like when I click on the first announcement link
By the way, embedding the content like this also counts as an access in the access report. Announcements Page is that embedded the Course Announcements. That may or may not matter to people.
So I'll go back to what I started to write in my original post that I deleted before sending and say it might be better to try and fetch the content through the API and then recreate it, possibly using an LTI.
Hello all, sorry to resurrect an old thread...
I'm a 9-12 teacher who has been gradually increasing my use of Canvas since approximately January. I went all-in this August and will never look back. I consider myself pretty adept at technology (I was pretty darn confident with Moodle), but it's been a while since I've had the time to devote to an LMS...that whole darn teaching thing got in the way for 8 years 
Anyway, Canvas is a game-changer for my classroom.
To the point: How do K-12 teachers accommodate parents' needs to view their students' Canvas accounts, without giving parents the ability to submit/modify assignments or send messages under their student's name ? At a minimum, I would like to be able to publish each day's Canvas announcement (and ideally the all of the recent ones, too) to an external site. It would need to be public, with no login required. I think an iframe would *probably* work, though I appreciate other and especially mobile-friendly ideas. Transparency with parents is ideal. It is not necessary that they be able to see any files/assignments/etc which are linked in the announcement -- just what was done during class that day, and what needs to be done for homework.
In a perfect world, I would be able to grant parents access to view everything in their student's Canvas for my course, without modifying it in any way. If this exists, I have not found it yet.
If anyone could kindly point me toward any ideas or existing discussion posts, I would be very appreciative!
Inoreader offers an HTML link you can use directly, or you can embed; that's how I get all my external blog content (my own blog, students' blogs, plus other RSS like Diigo) back into Canvas.
In Inoreader, subscribe to the feed.
Put the feed in a folder.
Click Folder Settings.
Go to Folder Information.
Click Export On.
Click HTML click.
You can then customize as needed with the dialogue box you see there.
Here's an HTML clip, magazine view (not full view, which is also available), of my students' blogs:
https://www.inoreader.com/stream/user/1005987531/tag/OU%20MythFolklore%20F15/view/html?cs=m
https://www.inoreader.com/stream/user/1005987531/tag/OU%20BothClasses%20F15/view/html?cs=mYou can share that link as it is, or embed it anywhere with iframe.
When I embed it in a Canvas course it looks like this:
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